AI-rewritten: This is a summary of an article from The Verge, rewritten by AI (Qwen, running locally) to make it easier to read. The facts come from the original article – read it for the full story.

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AI is often compared to junk food for the mind because it is easy and tempting, yet it harms long-term cognitive health. While figures like Elon Musk describe the brain as a biological computer, neuroscientist Paul Cisek argues this view is too simple. He suggests our brains are actually feedback-control systems that evolved over millions of years to help us navigate and control our environment.

Under the traditional computational model, thinking involves taking in information, processing it mathematically, and producing an action. For example, a baseball outfielder would supposedly calculate the ball’s speed and gravity to catch it. Cisek proposes a different approach where the player simply keeps the ball in their visual field by moving their body. This method relies on simple heuristics rather than complex mental calculations and better explains how our nervous systems have developed from fish to humans.

This evolutionary perspective shows that new brain abilities emerged to handle specific environmental challenges, such as navigating at night or remembering past experiences. However, the computational model fails to account for these biological structures and ignores a crucial feedback loop: human culture. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors learned by imitating each other, developing language and formal education to pass complex ideas across generations.

Big Tech companies are now dismantling these social institutions through AI products. Unlike the slow development of human culture over millennia, these technologies offer immediate gratification while undermining the very systems that allow us to learn from one another. The article concludes that we must shift our understanding of the mind away from algorithms and toward dynamic feedback systems that include our deeply social nature.